Spark (Fire Within Series Book 4)

by Ella M. Lee

  Copyright © 2021 Ella M. Lee.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination.

  Cover design by James T. Egan, www.bookflydesign.com.

  Developmental editing by Courtney Kelly.

  Line editing by Crystal Watanabe, www.pikkoshouse.com.

  Author photograph by Shannon Michelle Photography, shannon-michelle.com.

  www.ellamlee.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Ella M. Lee

  About the Author

  For Cara,

  the first and best beta reader, the Almighty Beta-Rah, who kick-started all my ideas.

  “That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular, and most inexplicable things that can befall us.”

  —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

  Chapter 1

  Nicolas opened the bottle of expensive champagne with an elegant twist of his hand and a pop that made me flinch. I didn’t like champagne—too dry for my taste—but I didn’t want to deny him two of his favorite pastimes: drinking wine and celebrating my successes.

  “How does it feel to be a published author?” he asked with a proud smile, his brown eyes catching the late-morning light and sparkling gently.

  “Not as exciting as I always imagined,” I said, accepting a glass from his hand. “Probably because it will be years before my book is read by more than eleven people, most of whom have already reviewed the draft several times.”

  Sitting before us on Nicolas’s coffee table was a printed copy of Lightning Clan: Beginnings. A terrible title, but I was going for clarity over cleverness. Fiona Ember was written under it. My name, on a book, standing out against the white-and-silver cover. This particular volume of text was half memoir, half technical deep dive, covering the timeline of how we had researched and created a new class of magic.

  Our new clan, Lightning, was an infant among eight others: Water, Flame, Sky, Smoke, Verdant, Wild, Wind, and Meteor. Although their opinions of us were currently at varying levels of annoyance—at best—we had decided to be gracious and magnanimous toward everyone. We would operate on a model of transparency, sharing our new clan’s knowledge and abilities with the magical community in ways that even Smoke, the clan responsible for new magical research, did not.

  As the best writer in the group, I had been tasked with creating books about our magic and experiences. Books that would probably sit around collecting dust for a long time because no one would speak to us right now.

  I supposed we deserved that. We expected it, having upset the natural order of things with our plans and our hubris.

  I hadn’t told anyone how much I dreaded the responsibility of chronicling our journey. It had meant combing through events and emotions I was still barely able to handle.

  In my book, I had written Daniel’s name two hundred and twenty-two times. I had counted.

  Daniel Shing, creator of Lightning Clan, magician extraordinaire, my best friend.

  Gone.

  Deceased.

  Sacrificed.

  Out of Daniel, Lightning had been born. Was a life an equivalent exchange for changing the world forever?

  It didn’t feel like it to me. The sharp needles that constantly pricked the edges of my heart if I thought too hard hadn’t faded yet, even ten months later.

  I missed my best friend, but sometimes it felt like I was the only one. That was unfair, of course; all of us missed Daniel. Nicolas had been his father figure. Ryan had been his teacher and mentor. We had all lived with him and worked with him and loved him.

  But it had been a long near-year, and it seemed like I was the only one who remembered.

  I didn’t blame them. They all had their own ways of grieving. I often found myself lost in the memories of others. My parents, dead for a decade. My friends in Flame Clan, killed when we’d raided Nicolas’s safe house in Vienna. All the people I had killed myself because being in a clan was never a peaceful venture. I was too sensitive for my own good, and the blow of Daniel’s death weighed heavily on me, like one of the final straws resting on the camel’s back.

  But we had so much work to do. There was barely time in the day for me to grieve. Everything about our magic was new and arduous and dangerous. Things we had taken for granted in other clans took us hours and days and weeks of research, experimentation, classification, and rule discovery.

  This process had happened at the beginning of every clan, but none of us had experienced it. We had all ridden comfortably on the foundations of centuries of magical learning and study.

  Now we were the ones who had to put in the back-breaking effort.

  Maybe someone three hundred years from now would benefit from my work. That thought honestly wasn’t very validating.

  “Successes come in many forms,” Nicolas said, offering me a wry shrug. “This one is personal, and that is good enough.”

  I drained my glass of champagne. Nicolas didn’t pour me another. A year ago, before all this, I would have curled myself into him, lingered in his arms, basked in his compliments and pride. We would have laughed together and teased each other and ended the conversation on the pale linens of his bed, content to let other forms of communication speak for us.

  “Thanks,” I said, kissing him briefly on the cheek and standing.

  These days, that was about as much closeness as I wanted with another human. I shivered. I tried to tell myself it was just the cool, dry air of Nicolas’s apartment seeping into me, but it went deeper than that. My magic crawled over my skin, seeking to comfort me, hugging me close, but it only managed to annoy me with its constant fidgeting. It hadn’t been able to fill the aching hollowness lately, just as Nicolas’s touch hadn’t either.

  “Who founded Flame?” Nicolas asked, draping his arms over the back of his couch as he watched me head for the door.

  Flame Clan had been my first clan, before I’d been captured by Water and assimilated into it, before I’d helped create Lightning.

  “Ynes de Ávalos,” I said.

  Everyone in Flame knew that, as well as anyone who had ever read Clan Creations, the book that would someday need to be amended to include Lightning, just as it had needed amendments for Verdant and Meteor.

  “Someday everyone will know the name Fiona Ember, too,” he said.

  “I don’t care if people remember my name,” I said. “Hopefully it will happen after I’m dead. At this rate, that’s likely. Has Claudius returned your calls yet?”

  Claudius was one of Water Clan’s leaders. Pinnacle members, we called them. I was one in Lightning. Just another annoying wrinkle added by Dan’s death—my place should have been his.

  Claudius had bee
n one of Nicolas’s closest allies in Water, but even he had distanced himself after the news of Lightning broke.

  Betrayal. Blasphemy. Aberration.

  “He will,” Nicolas said. “Soon.”

  I rolled my eyes. Nicolas received visions of the future, so I presumed he was speaking with prescience. Unfortunately, Nicolas’s visions didn’t often come with a time schedule, so Claudius’s call could come in minutes… or months. The last time he and Nicolas had spoken, the conversation had vacillated between wariness and hostility. Claudius wasn’t our enemy, but he had his own interests to protect, as well as a vast and sprawling clan recently relieved of a number of powerful members.

  “Keep me posted,” I said, pulling on my shoes.

  “Always, lamb,” he said, offering me a beautiful, wide, tilted smile.

  I returned it, feeling hollower than ever. It was almost a relief to feel the cold wind on my cheek as I let myself out into the winter afternoon and made my way toward the temple that held our clan’s sanctum—the magic’s core and source.

  A relief to feel anything at all.

  “Hi,” I whispered.

  I wasn’t talking to anyone. I stood alone in the cavernous wooden building that was Lightning’s most sacred space. Our entire “clan house” was actually a former temple compound situated on the outskirts of Osaka, Japan. Once abandoned, Joushin-ji—the pure heart temple—was slowly and surely becoming a comforting and safe home for our new magic. The main temple building, the butsuden, now housed our physical sanctum, the giant glass orb that held the source of our magic.

  I loved the contrast between the shining, swirling beach-ball-sized sanctum and the worn, ancient, solid wood of the butsuden. We’d cleaned it and repaired it, restoring the huge statue of the seated Buddha, as well as the gold leaf detailing on the alcoves, the smooth floor, and the painted ceiling, but it still held a regal, refined energy compared to the sanctum’s young and volatile power.

  A sanctum was a complex thing, the theory of which I still wasn’t quite clear on. Better magicians than me, like Nicolas, understood its abstract and metaphorical nature, but I never could get an exact handle on it.

  From the outside, our sanctum looked like a hand-blown glass orb, perfectly round and engraved with layers of overlapping wards. It was hand-crafted—by Ryan Zhang, the best magical craftsman I had ever known.

  Inside, it shimmered with the sparkling webs of Lightning Clan’s magic, constantly moving under the surface, shifting, self-replicating, and self-healing. Touching the orb gave you access to the magic inside—you could take it out, use it, grant it to others.

  But the orb also represented a metaphysical space. Magic was a structure and, in many ways, a living thing. Underneath its physical representation was a whole world where it lived and thrived. That was what the sanctum really was, the core and soul of magic, something that was so much more than a glass ball of static electricity.

  Touching the warm surface of the sanctum could grant you access to that space, too, but I hadn’t visited it yet. I was too nervous about how I would feel. The last time I had been there, I was constructing the clan with Daniel, back when we thought we were like gods, invincible.

  Turns out that wasn’t true at all.

  Human magicians aren’t gods. Lightning had taught me that.

  It was enough that I had my own sanctum to deal with. All clans had the same structure: there were regular magicians, and then there were commanders.

  I was a commander.

  A regular magician had a certain amount of magic gifted to them from the clan’s sanctum. It was essentially borrowed, tied to the clan, and limited in how much one could use it.

  A commander was a special type of magician who took the clan’s magic and formed their own private sanctum out of it. Having your own sanctum meant you were stronger in magic. You could do more, could draw on more.

  My sanctum lived within me, like a soul, but less mystical and mysterious. It, too, was a metaphorical space, shaped by its commander’s personality and ability. Some people had entire magical cities within them, or jungles or mountain ranges or oceans.

  Commanders could travel to that space and spend time in it, like a form of inward meditation or astral projection.

  I hadn’t done that yet, either.

  I should have. It should have been the first thing I did when I became a commander: gotten to know myself and my magic. But I was afraid.

  I’d been in Daniel’s crumbling sanctum once as he rebuilt it with sheer force of will. I’d been in Nicolas’s hostile sanctum once, in order to find him and pull his consciousness out of it.

  Neither of those incidents had scared me, yet I scared myself.

  Some magician I was.

  I knelt on the cold, worn floor in front of Lightning’s sanctum. It sat in the shadow of a giant wooden statue of the Buddha, and my gesture made me a supplicant to them both.

  I pressed my hands against it, careful not to activate the magic in any way.

  “Hi,” I whispered again.

  I was alone in the room, but I was never alone when I had magic, and I was never alone in the presence of this sanctum.

  Daniel and I had literally created this magic. It was a part of me. It spoke to me intimately and soothingly, and it was alive to me in ways I didn’t think the others felt.

  “I’m almost ready,” I told it. “I’m going to try.”

  It knew what I meant. I wanted to see the inside of the sanctum I’d helped create. Daniel had finished it without me, and I wanted to experience what he’d done. I needed to know what he’d done, if I wanted to understand it—and myself—more than I already did.

  My eyes filled with tears. This magic was Dan’s magic. It was his crackling webs of lightning, his beautiful snaps of power, his heart and determination and soul. When I sat close to the sanctum, it was as though he was there with me.

  “I miss you,” I said, something in me cracking open and spilling over with desperation.

  Because when I spoke in this room, it was almost like I was talking to him.

  “Soba or ramen?” Keisha asked me.

  “What?” I said, looking up from my laptop.

  This was our weekly “State of the Union” meeting, where Keisha and I discussed boring household business like food and laundry and repairs. Eleven people lived on the property, and they needed to be taken care of. We didn’t have the extensive infrastructure we’d all enjoyed at Water’s clan house, with restaurants and chefs and cleaners and staff.

  Luckily, Keisha was excellent at this sort of logistical work and had become our self-appointed “mother.”

  I helped because there weren’t many other options. Those of us with a network among the other clans—not me—kept tabs on what was going on in the greater magical world.

  Magicians like Nicolas and Ryan and Irina led research efforts with their vast power and experience. I sometimes helped with that, but I didn’t have their analytical minds. I could tell them how Lightning felt to me, and there were ways in which I understood it better than all of them, but I wasn’t great at systematic experimenting or testing or interpreting results and iterating on them.

  I threw myself at things and hoped they worked. Sometimes that ended well, sometimes it didn’t. That was all part of the fun of birthing a new clan.

  So I wrote books, organized data, and consulted on weird magical issues. And there were plenty of weird magical issues, enough to fill a dozen more books. Probably all eventually written by me.

  Keisha gave me a confused look, her brows raised like she had no idea what could possibly be wrong with me. “Should we stock up on soba or ramen? Or some of each? Our list doesn’t have either of them.”

  And this was part of what I did, too. I decided on soba noodles or ramen noodles for dinner.

  That was fine. Sometimes, that was about as much of a decision as I wanted to make. Decisions fatigued me, day by day. I was content to linger in the shadows, write about the others’ re
search, and make sure the house was stocked with an abundance of food. Instead, I constantly found myself the center of attention, asked to weigh in on decisions I felt I had no right to make.

  I pulled up the food delivery list. “I don’t have an opinion. Both? Let’s spend Nicolas’s money with abandon.”

  Keisha smiled, tossing her long dark hair over her shoulders. She had really settled into the clan, and I was happy for her. She had gained confidence here. As the only magician in the clan with advanced spatial manipulation—fancy talk for “can open portals between places”—she had her own research to do, and her findings were well-respected even though she was younger than everyone else by at least a decade.

  A pretty, bubbly girl with cute features and dark eyes, she was constantly chatting or dancing around as she went about her day. I hoped she wasn’t lonely, so cut off from the world and stuck among our rather formidable family, many of whom were scarily powerful and had decades of experience in magic. I was the closest to her in age, and I was still thirty-one years old to her twenty.

  She’d been taught by Ryan, though, and he’d instilled excellent technique and mountains of confidence in her. Nicolas doted on her like a favorite niece, and she looked up to him even if they weren’t all that close. I tried my best to be her friend, even if I was failing at that along with everything else lately.

  I’d been too distant with her, and Chandra, and Athena. All the progress I’d made in getting to know them had crumbled away as I ignored request after request to get dinner together or start a new TV series or go sing karaoke in the city.

  But the idea of relaxing and having fun filled me with pain and guilt. I’d been given this clan to take care of, and I needed to do that above all else.